Sun Introduces New Offering To Simplify IT Inventory Management

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced the immediate availability of the Sun Connection Inventory Channel, a new, free offering for Sun customers that allows system administrators and IT operators to quickly and easily discover, organize and report on their IT assets. The first inventory management solution to deliver one-click discovery across systems running the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Linux, Sun Connection Inventory Channel enables customers to actively manage their IT assets and gain valuable insight into their IT operations by tracking critical information including product type, product version, licensing and registration status and support contract ID number.


"Sun is continuing to expand its offerings to help customers more efficiently manage their data centers," said Steve Wilson, vice president of Connected Systems, Sun Microsystems. "The Sun Connection Inventory Channel provides a simple, powerful way for customers to track, sort, search and group their IT assets and support contracts. Ultimately, by automating the process, customers are able to easily understand their assets and make better informed IT decisions for the future."

Many IT administrators have complex management mechanisms in place to benchmark the health and performance of their IT operations, but often do not have a single view of what software, systems and storage they have and where these assets are running. While some solutions offer partial automation, keeping track of inventory, managing new additions and tracking removals is difficult, error prone and often requires manual processing.

Sun Connection Inventory Channel provides a unified view of hardware and software assets via a dynamic Web-based user interface. Customers can quickly search through thousands of assets based on a combination of search criteria including host name, product type, product version, support contract ID number and custom, user-defined asset tags.

The Sun Connection Inventory Channel complements the existing Sun Connection Update and Provisioning Channels by providing a lightweight and cost-effective asset management solution on a heterogeneous platform. The Sun Connection Update Channel provides central patch management capabilities on multiple operating platforms. The Provisioning Channel allows customers to perform provisioning tasks such as copy and paste of existing system deployments to new systems running the Solaris OS, Red Hat or SUSE Linux. For more information about Sun Connection, please visit: http://www.sun.com/sunconnection

The Sun Connection Inventory Channel is available free to all customers, whether an enterprise has purchased a high-end UltraSPARC-based server or a start-up has downloaded the Solaris OS for free. Access to the new channel is available at: http://sunconnection.sun.com/inventory